Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Two Shirts for Two YouTubers

Most of my thought process for Dan Brown's shirt is explained in the video I made for him:

I thought it would be a fun project since he has several clear graphic symbols that can be used to reference him and the Pogotribe community. I went through several ideas involving the Rubik's Cube, like having sillhouettes of different countries on the blocks, or even the letters in Hello World all mixed up on the Rubik's Cube, but they seemed unnecessarily complicated. Those ideas also didn't really involve the "eweniverse" idea, so in the end I went with the Rubik's Cube in space, which I think turned out pretty nice.

The WheezyWaiter shirt is much less involved, since I didn't come up with the concept; I simply put the design together. Alan messaged me asking if I could design a Coffee Craig shirt in the style of the Pizza John one, which was originally designed by Valerie2776. He sent me several photos to choose from, and I thought the one of Craig looking straight at the camera would be the most recognizable. I put it into Photoshop and removed the color and background, and then added posterization adjustment layer, which turned the image into only black and white pixels. Then I had to go back and burn and dodge parts of Craig's face so that it was recognizable as him without huge parts being in shadow or light without any detail. Once I was happy with that, I brought it into Illustrator and put a simple live trace on it to match the texture of the original Pizza John shirt. It doesn't look super professional and polished, but I think that is part of the charm of the original, and I wanted to duplicate that in Craig's shirt.